When we started to really shift gears on mental health after Operation Phoenix in the late nineties, we said we had to fast-track operational injuries to meet the sense of urgency. There was an argument that the injuries of the mind had to be as fast-tracked as the physical ones. We were having problems with just the physical injuries.
There was an attitude that you had to demonstrate the same sense of urgency to identifying the injury and bringing support to it, particularly in the first three to six months of post-deployment, where your greatest return is. I'm not sure whether that's been achieved. When you have a battalion of 800 coming back, you're overwhelmed. There's not enough surge capacity for these big deployments within the first three to nine months. If you don't hit them then, all of a sudden five or six years later there's a sound, and bingo, the person literally crashes.
It took me four years. You become a non-entity. You are a vegetable for months and months, until therapy and medication are able to bring you back.